Parents won't be warned of spanking

Child abuse prevention took a beating Wednesday in North Carolina. That’s when the state Senate rejected a bill that would require school administrators to tell parents their child could be paddled at school and allow adults to opt out of corporal punishment.

The Senate voted 25-21 against the bill that would have given parents in the 55 school districts that use corporal punishment a choice whether to allow their child to be spanked, The Associated Press reports. Now children in those 55 school districts can be spanked without their parents’ permission. If I were living in one of those districts, I’d be sure to contact my legislator to complain.

Here’s why: North Carolina is one of 21 states with a law that permits corporal punishment in public schools but may be the only state that does not monitor how that punishment is administered, according to Action for Children North Carolina, a child advocacy group, based in Raleigh.

Since there is no statewide ban of corporal punishment, Action for Children North Carolina has called for the practice to be standardized and monitored. Barbara Bradley, President and CEO of the group, said Thursday morning the group’s advocates are very disappointed the bill was stopped.

“We think it’s an issue of number one, parental rights—parents need to know whether their children are being subjected to corporal punishment or not and have a say and whether or not that kind of technique can be used with their children. And number two, we think that the opportunity for misuse of corporal punishment in very high.

“Sometimes, in some school districts, they have a grown male adult administering that kind of punishment to a young girl without anybody else in the room. Sometimes, it is done very harshly: We have seen evidence of marks, bruises, all kinds of things coming out of this, that border of abuse of a child, so we are very concerned about this issue.”

Spanking is a bad practice in general because it is linked with abuse, according to a study last year by the Injury Prevention Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In that survey of more than 1,400 mothers in North and South Carolina, mothers who said they or their partners spanked their children in the past year were nearly three times more likely to say they also doled out harsher punishments than those who said their children weren’t spanked. We’re talking beating, burning, kicking, hitting with an object somewhere other than the buttocks or shaking a child younger than 2.

If mothers who spank their kids will do that to their own children, should we be let strangers spank kids, and on top of it, not monitor them?